Discipline fail

There are some odd rituals in the Church of the Old School, and one of them is the deification of suffering. Remember that time Coach set up trashcans at both ends of the floor and made us run gassers 'til we puked? Remember when he yanked on our facemasks so hard our necks hurt for a week? Remember ... remember ... remember ...

And then the chuckles, the fond shakings of the head (Those were the days, boys!), as if sadistic coaches were a beloved heirloom who set their generation apart from These (Soft As Butter) Kids Today.

Odd, as I said. Damned odd.

Also, the sort of thing that makes Old School congregants sneer and laugh when they hear about what happened at a small Division III school in suburban Chicago the other day.

What happened was, Concordia University Chicago temporarily removed its men's basketball coach, Steve Kollar, after he conducted a disciplinary practice so brutal it sent five players to the hospital. This happened, allegedly, after some of the Concordians broke curfew during a trip to California, and it resulted in Concordia having to postpone two games over the weekend because ... well, because half the team was in the hospital.

And you can hear the Old Schoolers revving up already, can't you?

More tales of puking in trashcans. The reverential invoking of that scene in "Miracle" -- largely apocryphal, by the way -- where Herb Brooks makes his players skate Herbies until they drop after a lackadaisical effort in an Olympic warmup game. Perhaps there would even be a mention or two of the Junction Boys.

Don't know that story?

Well, it happened in 1954, in the middle of the worst drought in Texas in decades. The new football coach at Texas A&M dragged his team to a heat-seared pimple in a countryside dying of thirst, and put them through 10 days of hell so brutal 80 of his 115 players quit and one almost died of heat stroke.

The coach who did that was Bear Bryant.

The players who survived were forever after known as the Junction Boys. A man wrote a book about them, and the book got made into a movie starring Tom Berenger as the Bear, and the whole insane business became something just this side of noble.

As for the real Bear Bryant, he admitted years later that he was a damn fool to do what he did. Because for God's sake someone could have died.

It was a discipline fail just like what happened at Concordia was a discipline fail, And someday, if he's at all a man with some self-awareness, Steve Kollar will perhaps look back and call himself a damn fool, too.

Here's hoping.